Monday, October 03, 2016

Aversion to Peace

Vasu Reddy from Chicago
vasureddy@aol.com

Historically peace has always been the hallmark of prosperity and human development.  Whatever world history we can trace, the correlation to human excellence and peace is direct and irrefutable.  Perhaps the most sought after word in human life is peace.  “Peace on Earth and Goodwill to Men.”  While our history of thousands of years clearly correlates living in peace with living in harmony, the last 100 hundred years have really become human beings becoming more and more averse to peace.

A major portion of our documented history points to illegal or forced occupation, pillage, looting and things that typically are associated with the strong throwing their weight around the weak or disorganized.  Then came religious conversion as a by product of occupation and after effects of war.  The British along with the French, Portuguese and Spanish largely exploited with trade and divide and for a good three hundred years, along with throwing religious conversions, the 1900 century and beyond has become increasing more violent with intolerance.  When you even interject a small group of people with religious intolerance, the room for peace becomes non-existent.  Although religion is a new phenomenon with most of the religions on earth, the affinity to religion is paramount to most humans.

1900’s and on have had communism, dictatorship, fundamental societies, religious bigotry, fanaticism and all variations of influences on religious and regional groups have made it impossible for societies to live in peace.  There is some propaganda or diversion to life that infuriates that particular section of the society by simply injecting religion into it.  For some reason or the other religion gets the color of violence and the aspect of coexistence and peace get relegated to the past.

In the name of god there is more killing, there is more destruction and more suffering that any other earthly factor.  Volcanoes, typhoons, earth quakes, floods and natural disasters used to be major factors in loss of life, but they no longer major contributors to loss of life.  The technology and science is helping to deal with these issues and constantly improve the means to stave off natural disasters.

But religious fanatics has been growing by leaps and bounds and has over taken societies and countries and destroying the entire nation, its people, its infrastructure, and simply their way of life.  There are dozens of nations that have been devastated just because of factional and religious fanatics.  The very people that are of the same religion pay the heaviest price with life and their way of living.  It has become normal way of life to destroy everything around the world in the name of religion and comes with no ideological or historical logic.    The human life and its value have very little meaning in religious fanatics, in whatever form it exists.  At birth and at death, all are equal and choosing to live in peace is also something everyone strives for, and injecting any forced aspect of life simply doesn’t allow for the entire society to live the way it should.



It is simple to destroy civilization.  The vast majority of human civilization is in the open and unprotected.  These important parts of human existence and their past are every where on earth, and are of great significance in imparting the value of history and the past.  The religions that have constantly sprung into existence really don’t have to appreciate the significance of the history and past, but making them targets of destruction is simply destroying who we were and who we came from.  It has nothing to do with religion and propagating something specific.  Its vandalism and showing force against the history and people who are defenseless.



Somehow the very definition of societies and peace has become a distant concept for many parts of the world.  It is not that the propagation of violence and religion is bringing any kind of response from the rest of the society.  Outside of war, destruction and killing nothing good has come from these areas of conflict.  The only byproduct is that the spilling of the fanatics into disrupting the rest of the society that lives in peace, while gaining nothing in respect from the world.

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